turkey delirium

[dragonlady7]

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hokay

so the turkeys the farm raises are all 1) processed, on saturday, which went smoothly, and was fairly exhausting but nothing we haven’t done before, lovely 2) packaged, which went…. well it was going sort of smoothly, none of us could remember how it quite works, rocky start because while Farmsister is the one who knows how it works best, she was off getting the vegetables set up because VegMan could not miss a week of church services to be present for the busiest day of the year but he said he’d be back by 11:30 which would be great because vegetable-only pickup was going from 11-1 and then 1-3 was turkeys for people with vegetable shares and we had to have the turkey package-and-sort done by then so if he’d be able to cover most of that it’d really super help. But he didn’t get back from church until after 1, as it happened, so that sucked and we had to just be short-staffed. Anyway, we were making reasonable progress and then I went to get more bags and the box had one more sleeve of 100 in it. And I didn’t know how many we’d already done but I knew our total number was around 180. So that precipitated a crisis of where to get more turkey bags, underscored by both Farmsister and BIL being absolutely positive they’d counted and determined there were enough bags for this year so how could they have been caught short like this??? 3) sold. We did get everything packaged– some turkeys just had to go into kitchen garbage bags, clean ones, and not one customer batted an eye so that was good. The problem was that BIL ran in to do the sorting– people are matched with their size preference of turkey in order of precedence of when they placed their order, so it’s really critical to know the weight of each final packaged turkey– and when he did the sorting he worked into the wrong spreadsheet and so it was only the people who’d used the online order form and so a solid dozen customers who’d mailed in an order form or called on the phone or emailed separately were not included, and that customer base was most of the oldest and most loyal customers. So that was a fucking crisis. Also he printed out the spreadsheet and gave it to me to use as the customers came up to the table, and the sheet he gave me was not alphabetized, was not in order of when they placed the order, was not in order of size of the turkey even– it was arranged by NO criteria at all, it was completely randomized, I didn’t even know you could do that with a spreadsheet. And it was four pages long. And the first customer, who showed up fifteen minutes early to stand there, elderly and tottering, shivering in the fucking 20 degree gale-force winds, was not on the list; she’s on the edge of dementia and literally never actually places her order but is always convinced she did. (She’s vaguely aware that she’s not quite getting things right, but that doesn’t change that she’s been buying things here for years and expects to buy things here and yet consistently forgets to actually make her arrangements.) (We had to have her come inside and sit down while we worked out what turkey we could give her.)

The other thing is that the spreadsheet is supposed to tell me whether the customers paid the deposit on the turkey or not. They’re supposed to pay a $20 deposit. Sometimes they forget, sometimes they’re sure they did but they did not, and sometimes, fucking obnoxiously, they pay a deposit of a different amount of money, which we then have to know about somehow. One of them I was like “why the heck did you pay a $39 deposit” and she was like “oh that was the money i had, it was easier for me” and i’m like “cool do you see how confusing that is though” and she went off on her way and I know next year she’s gonna put down a like, $43 deposit or something, why the fuck. Anyway, usually that’s on the spreadsheet– and in fact it was, on the sheet he was supposed to use, but anyway. It was gale-force winds and 20 degrees and the turkey juices that leaked onto the table froze instantly into sheets of ice and the THREE DIFFERENT COPIES of the spreadsheet we had printed out (one that included almost all the customers, one that actually included all the turkeys but wasn’t in any order of any kind, and one that said whether the customers had paid a deposit and if so how much) all kept blowing away and had to repeatedly be chased down.

But we sold all the turkeys we were supposed to sell, by and large, and now that huge stressor is gone and done and packaged up and the checks are going to the bank today and that’s like. $20k.

Today I get to clean and re-set the slaughterhouse so tomorrow we can process 115 more turkeys, 90 for one farmer and 25 for another.

I think I have Wednesday off though.

As an aside, it’s 18F out, and I did finish insulating my cabin but we didn’t get the heater installed so instead I have a little propane heater that clips onto a 20-lb propane tank and has no thermostat, so i’m struggling to get it up above 45 so I can get dressed, as I type this. I think I gotta just give up and get dressed now, lol, and also, brr. (Your picture was not posted)